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Shouldn't relocations be largely suspended until the system learns to look at an entire family?

Kustaw Bessems March 29, 2025

Guilt can be a sickening ball in the stomach. Or a weight on your legs. It can be a voice that whispers to you that you are not worthy of all that.

There is a lot in the research report about displaced children from the benefits scandal for which the word painful is too commonplace. One passage that made me shiver was about guilt. Children, some of them now young adults, told the committee led by Mariëtte Hamer that they blamed their parents for their eviction because they thought they had cheated or spent too much money. When it later became known that the parents had just been pushed into a financial abyss by the government, the children's image changed. And now the kids are feeling guilty.

For a long time, there has been statistical fog about the children who were removed from allowance families by the state. The attention for this group grew after Harriët Duurvoort wrote an important column in this newspaper three and a half years ago about a family that lost its home due to the tax authorities and was then torn apart. Statistics Netherlands figures at the time showed that the number of relocations among benefit families was higher than average. A human government would have had the reflex: we're going to talk to more families right away. But the government didn't talk, the government kept counting. First, let's see if such a problem has a bit of scale. What is one destroyed family now?

More than a year later, figures, again from the CBS, appeared that seemed to grant absolution to the state. Because if you corrected for all the characteristics of the allowance families, there was little wrong. There were a relatively large number of young parents, single parents, low-educated parents, poor parents, parents with a migrant background, parents who came into contact with justice, addicted parents, and mildly mentally retarded parents. In short: those families were already so vulnerable, you couldn't say that such a relocation was due to the benefits scandal.

About the AuthorKustaw Bessems is a columnist for de Volkskrant and works as an advisor for governments and social organizations. Columnists have the freedom to express their opinions and do not have to follow journalistic rules for objectivity. Read here our guidelines.

There were just a few problems with those numbers. Just to name one thing: they did not apply to removals. The CBS had no data about that, so all youth protection measures, even much lighter ones, were lumped together. But those kinds of nuances were supplanted by welcome, relativizing news headlines. And reduced to mystery in the inevitable 'well, tut tut tut' piece of The Correspondent, where loudly expressed aversion to fuss is sometimes difficult to distinguish from law-abiding and lack of curiosity, especially to flesh-and-blood human beings.

Another year later, the Justice and Security Inspectorate reported that the financial consequences of the benefits affair often played a role “in the process that led to a child protection measure'. And now there is large, qualitative research as a supplement to incomplete numbers. Some of the thousands of families where children were removed had no problems before. Another part had manageable problems. The committee finds it “plausible that a significant part of the relocation would not have occurred if the recovery of childcare allowance had not occurred”.

And by the way, what everyone with common sense and empathy understands: for families who already had problems, the benefits scandal could be a final blow.

Lack of money increased the chance that parents and children would lose each other, because with broken furniture and too little food, and on top of the stress, you can't take good care of your children. In addition, parents were more likely to be judged as untrustworthy or incompetent because they were known as fraudsters, and then also as denying fraudsters. The children carry the scars forever: less social life, less vision of the future, trauma, panic attacks.

That is all sad and big enough, but the research raises a more fundamental question that is not staring us in the face for the first time: can relocations continue under the current system?

The committee outlines, and that also sounds uncomfortably familiar, a youth care system in which all parties working side by side each carry out a partial task. In which emergency workers respond to incidents and adhere to protocols. Where control prevails over assistance and temporary “solutions” are chosen over addressing deeper causes, such as financial instability.

Care workers, Child Protective Services, judges: they take child safety as their starting point, and that sounds good, but it is also vague. Sometimes insecurity means that a child does not go to school, other times it is physical violence and sometimes it is not even defined, so parents have no idea how to remove that insecurity. They fight against a shadow.

And it would make a difference if displaced children were always in a safe environment. But we know that's not the case too often. It has been towed from daycare to daycare. There is too much violence. Too much abuse.

So what is wisdom, now that this committee recommends that relocation should only be imposed on the basis of a high-quality, shared analysis by all the authorities involved, the parents and the children themselves? While thousands of children are taken away from their parents every year — no one knows how many — without such an analysis? With the most acute and serious exceptions, shouldn't the entire measure be suspended until the system has learned to look at a family as a whole?